'Klimt' more like essay than biopic

Film based on life, times of 19th Century painter

March 15, 2007|By Alan G. Artner, Tribune art critic

Last year was particularly good for the late 19th Century Viennese painter Gustav Klimt: Not only did his "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" establish a price record for the highest amount paid at auction for a painting -- $135 million -- but also a most unorthodox tribute came from Raul Ruiz, the great Chilean/French film director.

Price records do not last long, and Klimt's was twice superseded within six months, so it's already forgotten. But Ruiz's "Klimt" is only now making its way to the United States, with two screenings scheduled in the next week as part of the European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Treatments of artists on film usually have been aimed at audiences who know little about them. Not here. Ruiz's "Klimt," like his astounding adaptation of Marcel Proust's "Time Regained," presupposes familiarity and yields the most to viewers who have it, for this is not a biopic but an essay with a more fantastic approach suggested right in the opening credits.

There, a close-up of Klimt's allegorical figure, "Medicine," is accompanied by original music by Jorge Arriagada. But the score soon begins to parody music of Klimt's time -- the opening of Gustav Mahler's "The Song of the Earth" -- and the painting literally is turned on its head before completing a circle, the first of the film's many temporal and visual rounds that end where they started. (The form echoes that of a famous play from 1900, "Der Reigen," by Arthur Schnitzler, who once visited Klimt's studio.)

The clearest of the circles moves from Klimt's deathbed in 1918 to the beginning of the century and back again, as if the artist, felled by a stroke at 55, were having scenes from his later life flash before him. Some events, such as a scandal in Vienna over three commissions including "Medicine" and his honor at the 1900 World Exposition in Paris, actually happened. And several of the characters depicted -- artists, models, lovers, patrons -- were real people. But others are apparently Klimt's hallucinations complicated by Ruiz's abiding love for doubles, which sometimes haunt their counterparts and at other times pose riddles about art and reality.

Eventually, you know where you are in time only from individual paintings shown, which is difficult on viewers but fitting, as Klimt said: "Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist -- and that's the only thing that matters -- must look attentively at my paintings and try to glean from them who I am." Ruiz was himself trained as a painter, and his virtually plotless film has many subtle references to paintings including hand gestures made by Egon Schiele that echo Schiele's self-portraits and a "snowfall" of gold leaf that, along with Riccardo Aronovich's burnished cinematography, evokes Klimt's daring gilded works.

Arriagada's score, which fractures Alban Berg's Violin Concerto in one of the more involved linkages to Klimt's time, is arguably as important as John Malkovich's flamboyant and, at times, deliberately anachronistic Klimt. But the film also involves more aesthetic discussion than in any period film since Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice," so it's a pity the version shown will not be the director's cut, which adds a half hour to the running time here of 99 minutes.

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Raul Ruiz's "Klimt" will screen 3 p.m. Sunday and 6 p.m. March 22 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. 312-846-2800.